All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
Our state proudly hosted the 38th National Games of India and the sports fever has spread across Dehradun and other cities and towns of Uttarakhand. It is a thing of great pride for an individual to represent his or her country or state in any field, and especially so in a sport. But did you know that there is a big band of world travelers (easily over 200,000 people worldwide) who believe that systematic ‘country collection’ is also a type of sport? As per them, there are rankings and there is a lot of competition for the top spot too. And because such extensive world travel has both the physical (act of movement through difficult journeys) and mental (planning & organisation) aspects to it, we can thus call it a sport too.
I don’t fully buy that argument since rankings are there in business, economics and science too and these are definitely very competitive fields as well but, yes, some difficult journeys do require extensive planning, funding, training and execution, besides a dash of courage to take that leap of faith and enter the unknown.
So, who exactly are these crazy world travel people? Well, there are those who are part of this 70-year-old club (or cult) called ‘Traveler’s Century Club’ or TCC of California. It was considered a very exclusive club, the membership of which doesn’t require you to pay through your nose but just to ensure you have visited at least 100 or more countries. But none can be crazier than the other 2 very popular world travel clubs called ‘Nomad Mania’ and ‘Most Traveled People’. They are even more extreme since they divide the world not just into 194 UN countries or 250 odd ‘UN plus’ list, but into 1500 odd locations i.e. the world is split into states or provinces within each country and to be at the top, you need to visit as many as possible. And did you know that none of Nomad Mania’s 70,000+ members have done it all, but a few are very close to it. For these extreme world travelers, one of the reasons to travel is for world rankings and that’s why this space is ‘officially’ called competitive travel or ‘Travel as a Sport’.
I had earlier recommended a book on this niche topic called ‘Mad Travelers’ by Dave Seminara and now I also recommend ‘Welcome to the Hotel Nomad Mania’ and ‘The Curious Case of William Baekeland’, both by Harry Mitsidis, the founder of Nomad Mania.
So competitive travel is when people like these (and like me) decide that we want to be the ‘first’ to travel someplace or all places or have the ‘most’ countries or deserts, forests, etc., visited. Before being published regularly by our favorite Garhwal Post (under the name of the ‘Most Travelled Indian’), I did thorough research over 2 years on my world travel competition, just to make sure this wasn’t a hollow claim or name just for some fleeting fame. The research made me find 2 types of extreme world travelers in India – the majority who visit the political world and ‘count countries’, and the few who visit the natural world of deserts, forests, grasslands and tundra (people like wildlife photographers & enthusiasts, researchers and adventurers). In the world of ‘country counting’, I found 5 Indians clearly ahead of me and that’s why I set my sights on the natural world to be the number one in it.
Actually, there is a 3rd kind of traveller, too, and frankly the most well-known of them all. These are the very popular and excellent travel content creators on YouTube & Instagram. Most on YouTube are communicating with their audience in Hindi and, hence, are able to reach millions of Indians. YouTube also has little barriers to viewing since you don’t need to be lettered or educated to go through audio-visual content as opposed to reading. Video content viewing is a passive activity as well, whereas reading is an active one. And when it comes to Hindi vs English, the truth is that only around 250 million Indians (out of almost 1,500 million) know English as a 1st, 2nd or 3rd language, and just 0.25 million (or 250,000) Indians have English as their 1st language i.e. the language in which they think. Hence Hindi, which cuts across most states barring those in South and East, can be the best way to reach people on a mass scale. And these content creators travel extensively too but nowhere close to the levels of ‘Country Collectors’. For comparison’s sake, that would be around 50 countries visited on average for a world travel YouTuber vs 194 for the top world travelers.
Some of the super travel YouTubers are Varun Vagish (Mountain Trekker channel), Shubham Kumar (Nomad Shubham channel), Deepanshu Sangwan (Nomadic Indian), Paramvir Singh Beniwal (Passenger Paramvir) and Vishnu Saha (Wandering Maniac) and all of them are followed by millions. There is a blogging couple too (Savi & Vid of Bruised Passport) that uses English as their written medium and they have been to over 100 countries and, to the best of my knowledge, are probably the most well-travelled of the content creators. In my case since I have crossed 125 countries, I knew I was miles ahead of all travel content creators and my count wasn’t just made up of small European or island nations, but it was from travel to all extremities on Earth (including the Polar Regions). The closest people to me among these would be Savi and Vid only.
But in my heart of hearts, I knew I loved the natural world, so I wondered if I could break some records in this area. Then came the Eureka moment when I realised that no Asian or Indian had ever visited all Deserts of Planet Earth. Post that I went one step forward, researching if anyone had visited all major forests of the world, major grasslands, tundra & ice regions for that matter. As many know, these big 5 (deserts, forests, grasslands, tundra & ice) make up the living landscape on Earth, scientifically called ‘Biomes’. So that became my goal and that is why I claimed to be the ‘Most Travelled Indian of the Natural World’. I even applied to the official record keeping books in India and got my ‘most biomes’ record certified to further cement the claim. But of course, for me it’s not just the ‘most’ but the drive to be the ‘first to visit all’ that propels me forward. Such world travel may not be a sport, but I am in any case proud to do this as an Indian, since the passport is my only identity proof when I am outside India and mine is an ‘Indian’ passport.
For all these insane travelers of the various clubs, it is all about being ‘No. 1 or No One’. For them the objective of life is to travel, by any means necessary and to be the best in the game. But let me conclude by telling my extreme travel friends that we should always remember that this is a case of ‘travel as a sport’ and not ‘travel is a sport’. It really isn’t, or is it?
(Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet, and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and, in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home. Reach him at: www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/; nitin.gairola@gmail.com)
